Dr. Ami Ben-Amotz, Founder & Chief Scientist of Seambiotic Ltd.

Q&A originally appeared in the International Society for Applied Phycology‘s July 2010 newsletter.

What are the most promising properties of microalgae?

Algae, in comparison to ‘higher plants’, are taxonomically highly diverse. In the industry, we refer to the large genetic variability as the “unexploited potential” of Algae.

I believe that Algae can provide many new products spanning medical, pharmaceutical, cosmetic and nutritional applications, over and above algae and higher plant based products available today.

Algae not delivered ‘breakthrough developments’, the industry is growing quite slowly but steadily. Algae were grown mainly in the Far East (Japan and Taiwan) in the 50s, and process development has been slow due to difficulties both in cultivation and harvesting.

What is special about Seambiotic cultivation approach?

The cost of producing Algae is quite high mainly because Algae use carbon dioxide and fresh/sea water, which are quite expensive. After working so many years with Algae production for beta-carotene, we looked for alternatives to reduce the cost of production.

Today, we are able to use the waste of power plants. They include waste seawater used for cooling the turbines, and scrubbed flue gas emissions, which are clean enough for the growth of algae. Our model, which is new, uses the waste of the power plant, namely the seawater and the carbon dioxide to grow algae, thus saving a lot of money.

As of today, after 70 years of cultivation of algae, almost 100% of the commercial production of Algae is done in open ponds, and the issue of contamination is simply not true. It is possible to grow very concentrated biomass (clean like any agricultural product), without contamination. If we look at it from an agricultural point of view, the open pond also allows for better cultivation, fertilization, light concentration etc.

Of course, algae cultivation has to use land, but projects are often situated in land, like desert areas and marine areas, which is not used for agriculture, is cheap and found all over the world. That is the reason why almost all commercial Algae plants today use open pond production.

What are suitable locations for commercial-scale algae production?

Well Israel doesn’t have enough land to grow algae for biofuels because then we’ll need a lot of land. But Israel has enough land to grow Algae for high value products, in the order of 10 Ha facilities.

For Biofuels, we need hundreds or thousands of hectares of land, in areas where there is plenty of sun, easy access to seawater and large parcels arid land. Countries like Saudi Arabia, Baja California, Iran, Brazil and Australia come to mind.

The major factor for choosing the location of the site are concentration of Solar Radiation, access to Seawater, and Land availability, which is not used for urban or agricultural use, arid land with very low value and near seawater so it can be used for Algae cultivation.

What is new at Seambiotic?

NASA’s collaboration with Seambiotic came with the idea to use NASA’s aerodynamic expertise, and convert that to hydrodynamics. With the open pond system, we use water flow, and in principle, the hydrodynamics of water flow is very similar to aerodynamics. So NASA came with the idea that if we improve our hydrodynamics (water movement) we can significantly improve the productivity of our algae.

Preliminary experiments with NASA’s technology and design, I can confirm that it is actually true. The simple idea to improve the flow and mixing, we can increase the productivity of algae quite significantly.

Seambiotic is constructing a 10 Ha plant in Israel, to produce fine chemicals, not for biofuels. We also recently signed a JV agreement with an electric power plant in China (one of the biggest power producers in the country), and we are currently constructing large-scale facilities for commercial algae cultivation in Yantai, China. This is the first time China & Israel are pursuing a joint venture in Algae production.

What are your views on algal biofuels?

Algae biofuels gained popularity over the past few years because of oil price increases, and the search for green, alternative energy. Since there are concerns over insufficient food, the industry was not able to use higher plants, so the attention moved to Algae. Assuming that algae do not use agricultural land and fresh water, and delivers the high enough levels of photosynthetic efficiencies, it will be viable to use algae for biofuels and other uses.

It’s quite difficult to say how soon we’re going to see algae biofuels in the market, but the major limitations are quite evident:

The major limitations are actually the costs- both the cost of constructing the facilities, and the cost of production. As of today, the cost of production is quite high, so either the price of oil has to exceed $100/barrel, or the cost of producing algae has to fall below $100/barrel. When this happens, then we have a very good chance of using algae lipids to manufacture biofuels. So in my opinion it is all a matter of economics.

Prof. Ami Ben Amotz
Founder and Chief Scientist, Seambiotic Ltd.
http://www.Seambiotic.com